This is a very belated review, for which my deepest apologies, of a book I flagged well over a year ago on the Saints Will Arise Blog, but which I think will be of interest to many readers.
David Birch, Latin Prayer Aspects of Language and Catholic Spirituality, Rivo Torto@Drouin: Pax et Bonum, 2022. $US 27.95 (paperback); also available on kindle.
Latin, private devotion and the liturgy
There is a growing genre of books that focus on the reasons for retaining both Latin, rather than using the vernacular, and the traditional forms of the liturgy, in the face of the antipathy to the tradition that led to the revolution in worship post-Vatican II, and is currently in high favour.
This book though, tackles the problem from a rather different perspective, namely the Latin language's importance in conveying the truths of the faith; its deep integration into the spiritual infrastructure of the Western Church; and its importance to the very nature of prayer in the Catholic tradition.
Although it draws on numerous liturgical texts, including the office hymns, psalms and more, its primary focus is actually the relevance of Latin to public and private devotional prayer.
It is also almost unique in that rather than being polemical in character, it is clearly both the product of lectio divina, and a potential source for it.
The book provides a rich source of liturgical, devotional and other material to meditate on from all ages of the Church's history, and is surely meant to be read slowly; savoured and pondered, rather than read right through quickly in one go.
The problem of translation
A key focus of the book is the problems associated with trying to translate theologically dense concepts from Latin into English.
For most of the Church's history, prayers, litanies, theological formulas were normally composed in Latin: capturing all of the nuances of them in a single English translation is virtually impossible.
Early on the text, the book points out that most the translations in Missals and other sources do not even attempt to convey the underlying grammatical structures of the original, but rather focus on trying to convey the meaning in terms a person speaking today would understand.
This leads to two key threads running through the book.
Layers of meaning
First, Dr Birch, a retired academic linguist, provides a lot of explanation of the differences between the way the two languages work, and the alternative possible translations of many Latin prayers that should ideally co-exist in our minds as we read or pray them.
There are of course quite a number of books that explore similar ground for students of Latin, but rather fewer that do so in an ecclesiastical context, or in such a systematic way.
As such, the book will be extremely helpful for those with a knowledge of Latin but who want to gain a greater depth of understanding of it, as well as for those with little or Latin but who want to understand the way the language works in the context of the liturgy.
And on this topic the book is also a very useful bibliography for liturgical Latin, which includes links where texts are available online.
The book will also, I think, hopefully serve to inspire those with no Latin to actually learn the language.
Retention of Latin as a liturgical and theological language
The second thread running through the book, though, is a plea, based on these issues, to retain Latin as the language of the church (regardless of the form of the Mass) since without it, the tradition is all too easily distorted.
The book avoids entering into judgments on the reasons for the anti-Latin push, but the cynics amongst us (and that means pretty much all traditionalists these days) would say that that is precisely why so many church leaders today are intent on eradicating the use of Latin even in the Novus Ordo Mass.
How, after all, can one possibly justify so many novel propositions if people are constantly assailed with traces of the tradition!
The spiritual infrastructure of the church
The second, and perhaps equally important theme of the book is that the liturgy - in the form of the Mass, Office and sacraments - does not exist in isolation from either public devotional or private prayer, rather it is part of a much broader spiritual infrastructure that also needs to be preserved.
Litanies and other prayers, the book argues, provide important distillations of theological truths that both build on and support our understanding of the liturgy and faith more generally, and we need to pay deep attention to them.
Prayer and 'grammar'
The third key theme, and perhaps the most difficult for the non-linguist (such as myself!) to grasp, is on the nature of prayer, where Dr Birch categorizes types of prayer not by their purpose (thanksgiving, intercession, etc), but by linguistic, functional categories.
The terminology used - nominative prayer, vocative prayer, sociative prayer and so forth - though sometimes requiring some effort to grasp, need not necessarily be a barrier, since they are all carefully explained.
And there certainly is some value, I think, to be gained from thinking about analysing prayer from a linguistic perspective, though these categories wouldn't be my ultimate choice for regular use.
Competing approaches to exegesis and contemplation
That said, the book's emphasis on grammar and textual analysis as a way to prayer and contemplation (albeit not with these particular grammatical categories) is not entirely novel: as the book points out, an emphasis on the tools of the linguist to draw out meaning has a long genealogy in the Church, going back to influential writers such as Origen amongst others.
But it has to be said that the emphasis on grammatical analysis, even if only as a starting point for exegesis, has long been the subject of considerable debate, with the pendulum swinging back and forth, both within the Benedictine Order and more widely in the Church.
St Benedict's contemporary Cassiodorus, for example, sought desperately to preserve the Classical grammatical tradition in his Monastery of the Vivarium, but St Gregory the Great was directly critical of his approach, instead lauding St Benedict's rejection of the liberal arts, and proclaiming that the Bible was superior to the rules and analytical methods of the grammarians.
My own perspective is that while this type of analysis can certainly provide a useful starting point, it shouldn't be an end-point - and personally I see more gain from the study of typological and other allegorical approaches to meaning in Scripture and liturgy than deep grammar. But that is just my own personal preference!
Moreover, the book provides a rich selection of hymns, litanies, prayers, Magisterial documents, Scriptural and other liturgical texts that will be useful fodder for lectio divina, and the dimensions of them drawn out in the text will certainly repay the reader's effort.
It is worth noting too, that the royalties from the book go to Colebrook (Notre Dame) Priory, a traditional Benedictine foundation in Australia.
